AU: Potato growers may get collective bargaining power
The ACCC is looking into the possibility of enabling the South-East Potato growers Association and the Victorian Potato Growers Council to collectively bargain with buyers.
Rod Sims, chairman of the ACCC, says that this will give growers a greater input into prices.
"It makes for a much more efficient bargaining process, allows the individual growers, for example, to get joint legal input, so it just ... allows more ideas to go into the negotiating process from their point of view," he said.
"So each individual farmer is not alone, they've got the collective brains and financial power behind them."
However, at this stage, he says, this is all just proposal.
"It is illegal that's why they are allowed under our Act to seek authorisation to do it and that's what this process is about, where we've put out a draft decision that proposes to grant them authorisation to collectively bargain, so they all ban together to bargain with the processor to whom they're selling the potatoes," he said.
Source: abc.net.au
